“Life isn’t a tiptoe through the tulips.”–Shannon Hoon

I understand the value of cryptocurrency–I think. But the valuation? Forget it. Investors’ lives certainly won’t be a tiptoe through the tulips when and if the Bitcoin bubble bursts. But I’ll still love hearing Tiny Tim sing about it. And yes, tulips are still pretty flowers.

QuantumReality–A future after death? The notion of life after death has always been the exclusive realm of the spiritual/religious world–until now, that is. Physicist and author Roger Penrose, along with some others with impressive scientific credentials, now believe that information stored in our brains in a quantum state may live on, along with our consciousness, after we die.This report, on the Galaxy Today web page, hints at any number of ideas which I have expounded on in my other blog, The Millennium Conjectures.

“Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.”–Albert Schweitzer

Today’s sessions at the Association of Professional Futurist’s annual meeting in Seattle, Washington, consisted of morning sessions on efforts to improve human health in the third world. It included talks from Brian Arbogast of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, on transforming sanitation; Sarah Chesemore, also of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, on the future of vaccine delivery; and Jan Flowers, research scientist and clinical faculty member at the University of Washington, on dissemination of health informatics programs in resource constrained settings. They provide brief summaries of their work in today’s mini-cast.

“All cities are mad, but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.”–Christopher Morley

A Jetsons future?

Where will you live in 2050? What will the cities of the future look like? Tomorrowland? The Jetsons? Waterworld? Maybe they will look pretty much the same, but feel very much different. To sort out some of the possible scenarios, I sought out an expert on the urban landscape of the future. Cindy Frewen, Ph. D., is an architect and an adjunct professor in the University of Houston’s graduate foresight program. She designs near-term urban futures, and constructs scenarios for possible longer term futures.

Links to relevant stories appear after the audio file and embedded YouTube video below. A reminder that Seeking Delphi is available on iTunesand PlayerFM, and has a channel on YouTube. You can also follow us onFacebook.

“The best way to predict your future is to create it.”–Abraham Lincoln

“Think globally, act locally.”–Variously attributed

If you’ve never heard the phrase, “think globally, act locally,” you’ve probably been living under a rock. It’s origin is murky, but the concept is best attributed to Scottish town planner Patrick Geddes, and his 1915 book, Cities in Evolution. 100 years later, Neil Richardson and Rick Smyre have written the 21st century blueprint for Communities of the Future, in their 2016 volume, Preparing for a World That Doesn’t Exist–Yet. In my Seeking Delphi podcast interview with Neil Richardson, we discuss many of the bold ideas in the book, including the authors’ call for enabling what they call a “second enlightenment.” We also discuss three key points in the book–terms the authors coined–master capacity builder, polycentric democracy and creative molecular economy. Previous podcast episodes of Seeking Delphi have showcased technological quantum leaps that have the potential to cause radical upheaval of civilization. Authors Richardson and Smyre point the way for small to medium organizations and communities to deal with it–to embrace, use, and grow with it. A means to invent the local future.

Links to relevant stories and organizations appear after the audio file and embedded YouTube video below. A reminder that Seeking Delphi is available on iTunes, and has a channel on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook. The YouTube video of Robot’s Delight is embedded below.

Here is a fascinating question for those who fear the apocalypse. Can there be a post-collapse world that might not be so bad? In this short piece of fiction, my University of Houston foresight colleague, Eric Kingsbury, suggests a future transformation that might not be so bad. It’s re-blogged from his site, http://www.kiteba.com

Speculative fiction has always been a great way to imagine the future. The following is a short climate-related piece I wrote.

A Life Pod at Riverton

“When we look at biological analogues,” Jane began, lifting the cover off the evap system and dropping to one knee, “we see the many ways in which large organisms are vulnerable when climate push comes to climate shove.”

The sun hovered in an infinite sky, bright, blanching out any atmospheric color. It was spring, and the air was warming, with a sweet sugar breeze.

Jane lifted a hand to shadow her eyes.

“Elephants, lions, cows, all the big mammals,” she said, then gestured in the direction of several grassy mounds that rose from the prairie. “Too big, too slow, too pack-oriented. Vulnerable.”

Then, she reached into the evap unit and pulled out a length of rotten rubber hose.

“Tell me and I will forget, teach me and I will remember, involve me and I will learn.”–Benjamin Franklin

My apologies to all you educators out there. I just had to get that Woody Allen line in. It makes sense, though, that teaching something as fluid, changing and uncertain as the future requires creative tools to involve the student and develop the appropriate mindset. In episode #5 I talk with two individuals who are taking different approaches to the task.

Peter Bishop

The first interview is with career futurist educator, Peter Bishop, founder of Teach the Future.™ His aim is nothing less than to make future-think modules a standard in education. I then talk with game developer Robert Mattox about his old school approach to involvement–a board game. Appropriate links to all the subjects in this program can be found below the audio and YouTube files that follow. A reminder that Seeking Delphi is available on iTunes, and has a channel on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook.

“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”–Thomas Jefferson

It’s not likely that Thomas Jefferson meant to disparage study of the past, it’s just, like Albert Einstein’s missive that imagination is more important than knowledge, he meant that it is our dreams of the future that enable us to build a better world.

I’ve been dreaming about the future since I was a kid. Daydreaming, my parents would have said, and my wife certainly would say. But that’s OK. Somebody has to do it. If humankind is going to survive the the challenges that lie ahead, somebody needs to be thinking further ahead than the next pay check, the next quarter’s profit, and the next election. Let’s do it together.

On Seeking Delphi, the podcast, I’ll address many of the myriad uncertainties that lie ahead, some of them with existential consequences. Some of them just for fun. But all of them the stuff that imagination–and dreams–are made of.